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Milk Frosting
1 1/2 cups sugar 1/2 cup milk 1 teaspoon butter 1/2 teaspoon vanilla Put butter in saucepan; when melted, add sugar and milk. Stir, to be sure that sugar does not adhere to sauce-pan, heat to boiling-point, and boil without stirring thirteen minutes. Remove from fire, and beat until of right consistency to spread; then add flavoring and pour over cake, spreading evenly with back of spoon. Crease as soon as firm.
This is a fudge frosting in all but name: a milk-and-sugar syrup boiled to the soft-ball stage, then beaten until it clouds and thickens. Everything depends on where the syrup lands, and thirteen minutes is only an approximation of that.
- Cook to temperature, not to the clockThirteen minutes assumes a particular pan, burner and volume. Use a thermometer and pull the syrup at 236-238F (soft-ball); much below and it will never set, much above and it turns grainy and stiff before you can spread it.
- Do not stir once it boilsThe instruction is deliberate. Agitating a hot sugar syrup seeds large crystals and gives a gritty frosting. Stir only until the sugar dissolves, then leave it alone.
- Pan and scorchingMilk sugar syrups catch easily. Use a heavy saucepan holding at least 2 quarts, since the mixture climbs as it boils, and keep the heat moderate rather than fierce.
- Cool before beating"Remove from fire, and beat" works better if the syrup rests off heat for a few minutes first. Beating around 110-120F gives fine crystals and a smooth, opaque frosting.
- Flavoring goes in lastVanilla loses much of its aroma if added to boiling syrup. Adding it at the end, as written, is correct.
- Work fastOnce the frosting loses its gloss it firms within a minute or two. Have the cake ready and spread immediately; a spoonful of hot milk beaten in will loosen it if it seizes.
- "Crease as soon as firm"This means scoring the surface into serving portions with a knife while the frosting is still soft enough to mark, so it does not shatter when cut later. Standard practice for sheet cakes and squares.
- YieldRoughly a cup, which should be enough to top a single 8- or 9-inch layer or a small sheet cake. Double it to fill and cover two layers.
Boiled milk frostings sit halfway between icing and candy, and they turn up throughout American household cookery from the late nineteenth century onward, when granulated sugar became cheap and reliable enough for home candy-making. The method is essentially that of fudge: dissolve sugar in a dairy liquid, boil to soft-ball, beat as it cools so it crystallizes finely. Cooks of the period judged the stage by dropping syrup into cold water or, as here, by timing the boil, since household thermometers were still uncommon. The direction to "crease" the top while soft points to cakes baked in square or rectangular pans and cut into portions, one common format of the era alongside round layer cakes.